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(excerpted from comments to the nation’s Community Action Agencies)

Good morning.  Thank you for inviting me to be with you today here this morning.  I’ve been asked to join you and talk for a bit about the connections between the work you do as Community Action Agencies and the challenges of neighborhood revitalization.

To get there I am going to detour a bit.  I want to start by drawing attention to an article in last week’s Washington Post.  There’s nothing special about it, nothing at all.

But I found it especially illuminating.  The title was “Jobless rate steady in DC, up in Md, and Va.”  The key piece of information was that the unemployment rate in DC was 11.1, third highest in the nation behind California and Nevada, while Maryland’s was 7.3 and Virginia’s 6.5. Embedded in this simple set of facts is an incredibly powerful lesson for us community developers, but a lesson that while essential, is one I suspect few of us are comfortable confronting.

So before I return to that article and that lesson and the discomfort that may be there, I want to detour a bit further.  Meanwhile, in the back of your minds, I’d ask you to start thinking about what these rather mundane statistics might have to tell us about our work as community developers. Here is a clue:  ask yourselves who lives in Washington, DC that unemployment would be almost two times Virginia’s?

In my line of work in low and very low income communities, one of the hardest challenges I face is the painful work of truth telling, which is, of course, the other half of the painful work of truth hearing.  I generally approach this work not with answers, but with questions, and over the years I have found that such an approach can be unsettling.  For example my grandmother is quite poor.  She lives in a trailer in southern Louisiana.  She’s had eleven children.  Nine are poor.  But if it is unacceptable for me as her grandson to ask with moral overtones how come she had so many children when she never had money, I can only imagine how off limits that line of inquiry is for you on the front lines who aren’t family.

At the core of so much of the work are a range of hard-to-hear realities for many communities, and, I suspect, on a one on one level, for many families and individuals.  Which tees up my first question to you this morning: What do you think are some of those hard-to-hear realities?  Who is served by naming them?  Who or what is served by saying nothing?  What is your experience embracing or dodging these sorts of questions?

Before I relate the content of that Washington Post article, let me tell you a little bit about a collection of five neighborhoods in Norfolk, Virginia and my work there the last few years.

Norfolk is a medium sized American city of roughly 300,000 people.  It has a long standing economic relationship with the US military.  It’s a coastal city.  To give you some orientation, it is part southern, as you’d expect, with all that implies. And I mean all. It is part military, with all that implies.  And of course, it is coastal.

In recent years Norfolk worked through much of the less successful side of its urban renewal history, and has done a truly splendid job with its downtown.

In several instances it has implemented a real commitment to high quality urban planning and design and architecture.  It shows.  And there’s a been a real focus on economic diversification, so what once was almost entirely a military-based economy now has a substantial financial sector, and an emergent higher education component.

The “old” Norfolk has for 20 years been slowly evolving into the “new” Norfolk.  It is not there yet, but the upsides and downsides of such a transition are there to see.  And so here is my second question for you community developers this morning: What do you think those upsides and downsides might be?  What are the implications?  Who wins, so to speak?  Who loses?  What do you suppose might be some hard conversations you can imagine having as community developers trying to guide Norfolk forward?

Now, part of the process Norfolk has gone through since the 1970s meant revitalizing several newly prominent near downtown neighborhoods.  The main one is named Ghent.

Ghent is a fabulous near downtown residential neighborhood with two high performing commercial corridors and an intact historic housing fabric.  There’s mostly single family homes, but enough medium density older 1920s apartment buildings to give the neighborhood serious retail purchasing power owing to numbers, provided residents are of means.  It’s neatly circumscribed between downtown and a set of rail yards along an older industrial area that today is mostly benign and which holds great development potential.

The commitment to good physical planning principles in Norfolk the last three decades is evident in much of the mixed income housing that’s there in Ghent, and consequently this part of Norfolk is quite racially diverse.

But you should have some of the rest of the story.  It is important that I identify some of the other “truths” about Ghent.  For in each “truth” are elements of lessons for each of us as we think about neighborhood revitalization, and your role as change agents for Community Action Agencies, and the hard-to-ask questions, and hard-to-hear realities.

• • One is that there are no poor people there.  It’s too expensive.  And as a matter of actual and de facto policies, poor people are not wanted.  I don’t want to leave this dangling and suggest this is good or bad.  For now I am just telling you a story.

• • Two is that there used to be poor people there.  When that was true, Ghent was not a thriving neighborhood by some standards; but acceptable if not thriving according to other standards.  Here I am locating yet another question:  What is an acceptable normal for a neighborhood?  Who gets to decide? How is this related to the work of neighborhood revitalization?

• • A third truth about the Ghent neighborhood in Norfolk is that while any actual displacement of poor families from Ghent occurred many years ago, the bitterness of displacement both continues to be felt, and felt not even by people who were themselves actually displaced.

Rather, the “feeling” is not one owing to having been displaced but rather, more of a shared-lot sense by a class of people who today have no personal recollection of displacement, but who feel absolutely certain that any improvement in their neighborhoods can only come about at the cost of their removal.

Removing poor blacks from Ghent is like taking the poor white Irish out of South Boston:  both clear away huge impediments to one kind of economic development while simultaneously raising a whole host of questions about what might constitute community economic development.  And we have not even touched on the moral railing in all of this, where we’d try to answer the question:  what is just?

• • And four is that this “empathic fear” as I have come to call it – and which I see in every distressed neighborhood in America, and that I know to exist in the minds and hearts of the communities of people living in those neighborhoods – constitutes a massive part of what holds many of these communities back.  By this I mean we have a paradox deeply embedded in the challenge of community development:  our “customers” are on the outside of the economic mainstream looking in.  Yet like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, who never really left Kansas, and who all along possessed the power of the red slippers, the keys to prosperity are far more internal than perhaps we give credit for.  Which is relevant because our tools – housing tools, financial literacy tools, weatherization tools to name a few – only constitute – at best – a helpful hand into the mainstream.  A more affordable home, a greater capacity to make wise financial decisions, and reduced home heating costs are just three examples of assistance that offers no guaranteed entry into the mainstream.

And herein is the paradox:  poor people are on the outside of the economic mainstream – whether the measure is income or wealth – but the tools we have, while helpful, don’t really get them across the threshold.  For that, poor people have to make changes they rarely seem to make, and which society – and our field especially – rarely if ever seems to require.  We have developed a whole kit of tools that help accommodate being poor, but to get further than that requires asking some pretty tough questions and raising some pretty tough issues.  And by tough I mean uncomfortable.

In my view this is one of the great on-going challenges we face in the field of community development:  figuring out where “place”s ends and “people” begins, and, vice versa, where “people” end and “place” begins.

Of course this is all the more difficult because in truth they cannot be separated.  They are distinct.  We have work to do that is about real estate.  And we have work to do that is about the people who own and rent that real estate.  Our imperative therefore includes figuring this out, and in doing so, one thing I’ve concluded after so many years working on revitalization challenges, is that while we’ve done a great job teaching people how to collect food stamps, we’ve done a terrible job teaching them how to grow and cook spinach.  So now as you begin to connect the dots, what I am really starting to get at is this relationship between people and place, between a person’s sense of self and how they relate to their home and their block and their school and their shopkeepers, and how, in turn, these homes and streets and parks and stores say something about life there in that neighborhood.  So my next question is this:  What signals are being sent?  Who “reads” these signals?  Do these signals matter?  And if so, how and why?  If they don’t matter, then what are you saying about markets?

So going back to that Washington Post article, remember that the unemployment rate in DC is above 11 percent and 6.5 in Virginia.  More than the numbers is the larger narrative we have to pay attention to.  What accounts for so many in DC being unemployed by comparison, especially when this is one large and melted market of jobs and labor supply?

Why is this so important?  How is this central to community development, and how could it be central to your work in particular, those of you on the front lines working with people, seeing people’s credit scores, knowing the details of their lives, their hopes, their challenges?  I want you to imagine my grandmother and her 11 children knowing that she is poor and so are nine of her kids.  Where does “she” begin” and where does the “neighborhood” she lives in end?  Try to imagine her.  Now try to imagine her trailer.  Now try to imagine the area of town she lives in.

When I reflect on these complex issues, I’ve come to some conclusions.

One is that poverty as a problem to solve is a very different problem than affordable housing. Poverty is not having money and not having ready access to money and not having the means to make money.  If you build housing that is less expensive, you have helped a family in the following way.  You have reduced their housing costs, and indirectly increased what’s leftover for something else.  Instead of having to choose between rent and food, or rent and clothing, more can go into those other things.

Is this important?  Of course it is.  That’s not in question.  But what is in question are the deeper more relevant issues at hand.

Let’s suppose we do reduce the cost of the housing, say, from $640 a month to $550 a month.  We can do this through a variety of mechanisms.  For example, we can buy less costly land on which to build our new apartment building.  Suppose in one scenario the land is $1M.  If we build 100 units, that works out to $10,000 per unit in land costs.  If we amortize that over 30 years at today’s rates that’s about $60 a month for the land.  In another scenario in a better part of town, the land costs $2.5M.  In that case the land is now $150 per month per unit.  The difference per month to the renter is $90 a month.  But let’s look further at that example.  In the first scenario, on less costly land, we have to ask “why is this land less expensive?”  Invariably the answer is because the site is not in as great demand as the other site.  Which begs the question:  “why not?”

We know the answer to this.  What we must explore are the implications.

So why is parcel B less costly than parcel A?  Probably parcel B is in a less desired part of town.  It turns out that what makes it less desirable is a big part of the answer to the larger question, the one about there “place” ends and “people” begins, and vice versa.

A less desirable place is going to have fewer amenities.  The stores that are near this site will be tired.  They will be run-down.  It is very unlikely that they will communicate confidence and vibrancy.  It’ll be near fewer if any quality stores.  It’s be near fewer if any quality parks.  It might be near some things that people just would rather be away from like a noisy highway or a factory, or drug dealing in those parks.  What we have to understand is that characteristics of the surrounding environment will help set price.

This presents us with a dilemma.  All else being equal, which parcel to choose.  And something we have to explore at some point: why?

Suppose we choose the more expensive lot.  That is going to give us more costly units.  We can do a project, and that may have value in some broader sense, but the more expensive lot generates $640 a month rents, or an apartment a single mom can afford who earns roughly $11/hour.  But if we buy the cheaper lot, we can generate a $550 a month rent and that means someone earning about $9.50/hour can afford that apartment.

Why do this?  Well, the cheaper land allows that single mom to pay $1,100 less in rent in this hypothetical example.  And that’s real money.

Let’s take this a step further.  What are the other ways we can alter the equation?

Another is to add more units.  Let’s say instead of 100 units, we go up another floor and develop 130 units.  In this case the land cost /unit cost is now $7,700, way below what it was when we penciled out 100 units and land cost/unit was $10,000.  When we amortize this, our costs go down from $60/month to $44.  Now we can move my $550/month rent down to $534/month, and that means someone earning $9.25/hr.  We’ve created a slightly denser building, and developed it on an undesirable lot, but we have accomplished two things.  First we created 130 units of affordable housing, and 130 is a lot more than 100.  Second, we reduced rents from $640/month on the costlier lot to $534 in the denser building on the cheaper lot.  This allows the single mom who’s our client to now potentially pocket another $192 a year, so over a year she really now has an additional $1,400 in savings.

What might she do with this extra $1,400 that we’ve created through a focus on land price and density?  Over five years at current interest rates that’s more than $7,000!  This is getting to be serious money.

By buying the cheaper lot and by going denser, we’ve effectively put $7,000 in Susan Johnson’s pocket.  With this she can buy a car.  She can put down $1,000 on a $65,000 condominium, and save the other $6,000.  She can do a lot.  And suppose we have been especially thoughtful and structured an IDA match.  We can quickly imagine Susan Johnson being in a very different position five years down the road.  That’s one way to look at it, and an important one.  It’s based on real data.  It’s aspirational and optimistic.  But not in entirely unrealistic territory.

But two questions quickly surface.

The first has to do with the project.  We went from a project of 100 apartments for very low income families to 130.  And we went from a project on costly land in a desirable part of town to more affordable land in a less desired area.  To get rents as low as possible we’ve also spent a bit less on landscaping and on materials.  We have created the following cocktail:  on the upside, we have 130 units of housing for families with very meager wages and little to no savings.  In short, they have few options in most metropolitan regions.  Also on the upside we have more than $900,000 in collective equity held by 130 families, all else being equal, and there’s enormous power in that, used properly.  But what about the downside?  How wise is putting 130 families at $7-10/hr in one building?  History would suggest not very wise at all.  We will have crime.  We will have behaviors that send signals to the wider market.  We will have very limited retail purchasing power.  The commercial strip nearby will grow tired.  Plus the low rents came in some respects owing to lesser quality construction materials, and so the building will have more than normal wear and tear.  And as the site – remember the more affordable of the two – was in an undesirable part of town to begin with, overall demand for that part of town has likely gone down.  So your challenge is to decide which course to pursue:  more or less affordability?

The second has to do with Susan Johnson.  She is at $9 an hour.  But in all likelihood this is only one part of the story.  Just like the story of the Ghent neighborhood in Norfolk, Susan Johnson is complicated.

It turns out that she has not one child but three.  Her FICO score is in the low 600s.  She does not know how to grow or cook spinach.  Her boyfriend who sometimes provides extra cash almost got a job at a local company but failed a urinalysis.  She is 29 but she reads at a 6th grade level  She has very low level math skills.  In the 130 unit building we have built, she is likely to be across the corridor from Albert Robinson.  He’s an extremely hard worker, that is when he shows up, and his employers are generally pleased when he shows up, except that he rarely if ever shows up on time.  And when he is home, his unit generally has a lot of his kids stuff out front, and he usually parks up on the front lawn rather than in the driveway.  Twice the past year the police had to show up at Mr. Robinson’s after neighbors called about the yelling and screaming late at night.

So what’s really emerging is a very intertwined story of people and place.  We may be using property cost reductions to achieve affordability.  We may be aiming at affordability to chip away at poverty.  But if our main tools for reducing costs – density and resulting volume on one hand, and less desirable locations on the other – result in driving down demand by the market to join that community, we may have obtained affordability at the price of a community’s health.

Which brings us to the central question you must face as you contemplate people and place:  what problem are you trying to solve?  Are you trying to intervene in the lives of families in ways that increase their chances of joining the economic mainstream?  Are you intervening in the lifecycle of a neighborhood to grow value there, and as a result, increase wealth?

I’d argue that fitting the two together requires not that we do one or the other.  Nor does it require that we do them both.

Actually it requires that we do something else entirely.

It requires that we focus not on job creation per se.  Nor on housing development per se.  Nor on market stabilization either.  Not in the social context of mainly poor people.

Rather it s that we focus on capacity.  The capacity of the people we care about to do well.  Here’s the paradox for you who work for Community Action Agencies.

All the money is in housing and neighborhood revitalization.  Yet your core competencies – working with people – have never been more important.  I am not saying to ignore neighborhood revitalization.  I am not saying to ignore anti-poverty work.  I am saying that your special skills are actually the glue that holds the whole together.

While bricks and mortar are important, getting Susan Johnson to not have a fourth child is going to do more for her and her community.  While intervening in a looming foreclosure is critical to stemming an outflow of value from a neighborhood, really boring in on how the Robinson family spent money on Direct TV and a new truck instead of making mortgage payments is of equal if not greater value.

Let me close with a short story about another community I work in, this a rural former mining town in Arizona with very high rates of poverty and a range of cross cultural challenges, not least which is the challenge of the obesity epidemic on the Tohono O’odom Nation.  In the town I’m referring to, there are three cultures – Hispanic, Anglo, and Indian.  The history is not pleasant, with all the racial ugliness you may imagine.

In the mid 1980s the copper mine closed and with it went half the town’s population and any meaningful wages.  This town has slowly tried to rebuild itself.

One of the great challenges in this isolated rural town with high rates of poverty is physical health.  Not only is this a poor community but obesity levels are among the highest in the United States, surpassing even those of Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama.

Some have called this a food desert.  Like much of rural upstate NY and rural western PA, for example, it can be easier to find Twinkies and Ho-Hos at the store than fresh vegetables.  Or in this case, what is known as fried bread, a kind of deep fried trans fat sugar bomb preferred by Native Americans.

But two things worry me considerably about such labels.

First, while I concede choice is better elsewhere, I do not believe the rhetoric that people don’t eat fresh produce because there isn’t fresh produce in the stores.  In my experience, the fresh produce is, in fact, there.  In this small town there’s an aisle for Ho-Hos and a section for produce, with chiles and corn and fresh lettuces and squash and Brussels’s Sprouts and the like 12 months of the year.  The produce is there for anyone who wants it.

Second, a place being called a food desert seems like a very convenient way to say that people no longer have the power to choose.  That somewhere along the line the we human beings in 21st century lost our individual capacity to make choices and be responsible for those choices.  It seems to me that people are no more forced to watch a program on television they dislike than they are required to eat Twinkles and cheese dogs and fried bread.

The key word here is “easier”.

Why?  Because while it can be easier to find fatty and salty processed foods than to find tomatoes and broccoli and apples, it is not impossible in this little Arizona town to find fresh vegetables.  The minute we cross the line and locate the responsibility for a poor diet with the grocer is the moment we have given up our own agency.  I am reminded of that great Alice Walker quote, “the most common way people give up their power, is by thinking they don’t have any.”

It is true that the grocery store is not great.

But it is also true that it sells flour and milk and yeast and salt, and that every home in town has fresh drinking water.  It turns out that these are the ingredients for bread.

And in this store there’s spinach and dried beans, great sources of iron and protein and vitamin A.  And this same store carries canned tomatoes which supply extremely valuable lycopene.  In the refrigerated section they carry eggs, which can be scrambled, baked, souffled, and even pickled, and in any event provide a great source of protein rich calories.  And just in the next aisle are limes and lemons and the vitamin C they have, and fresh thyme and cilantro.  Even in this poor community, among the poorest in the United States.

And wouldn’t you know it.  Eggs and tomatoes and chiles and cilantro make a fairly decent meal.  Water and oil and flour and tortillas are pretty easy.  And half a mile away is a hardware store that sells cast iron skillets for $8.99

Why am I telling this story?  Because the obesity epidemic is being described as a function of green vegetable availability, and not a derivative of choices and knowledge.  Because we find it easier to talk about all that is missing in the lives of poor families than all that is present.  Because we have become accustomed to creating food stamp programs instead of “this is how you cook” programs.

We don’t have food deserts.  We have an accountability problem.

For the world to change, our communities must change.  For our communities to change, we have to ask hard questions.  We have to push against the commonly held view that to do so is somehow blaming the victim.  Somehow making fun of the fat person.  Somehow beyond the pale.

We’re in a fix of our own making.  We know the way out.

You in this room are one of the few groups in America with the software to do this and the hardwiring to do it right.

You can build housing, and we need that.  And you can focus your considerable talents on neighborhood revitalization.  And we need that too.

But what we really need is a nation of people who can grow their own vegetables when the grocery isn’t so terrific, and in the event the sun’s not shining, we need a nation of people willing to break a few eggs.

Comments delivered by Charles Buki on January 17, 2011 in Covington, Louisiana at Starlight Baptist Church, in honor of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Councilor Dunn asked me to be an instrument. And you may recall from King’s last sermon, given in Memphis at Bishop Charles Mason Temple, when he talked of the moment in history most appealing to him.  Hungry to sit with Socrates and Aristotle, he would not have preferred ancient Greece to strife-torn America.  With a deep desire to see Roman law in action, he would not have preferred even the time of Christ.  Nor the Renaissance, nor with Martin Luther, and not with Lincoln.  It was rather the turbulent times of the 1960s and 1970s he ached to be a part of, so that he could, as he said, do “God’s will.”  To be an instrument.

Well Councilor that’s a tall order.  To be an instrument is asking a lot.  To be an instrument on this day, I need to tell you a little bit about my mother.

On my way to Covington that last time, in 2009, I’d called my mother, who was born in 1940 in New Orleans, to let her know where I was headed.  She recalled Covington with great affection, remembering how when she was a little girl in the late 1940s, her father and mother and she and her brother would drive from New Orleans to the North Shore, where it was cooler, and where there remained stands of pine trees.  They would picnic in the gentler countryside.  I felt her smile through the phone, as I knew she would.

But I also felt her grimace, for it was not long after I was born in Little Rock when she decided to leave the south, and leave for good.  My mother’s sense of fairness did not permit her to stay in a region, no matter how much she loved it, and was culturally of it, that at the time refused to make a place for everyone.  And I suspect that she has always in some way regretted that decision, by her choice to find her way in another geography.

Such a choice – to turn away from the place where you were born, to be far away from fresh shrimp, and from sassafras, from Dewey Balfa, the fiddle, the accordion, and from andouille sausage – is in some profound and profoundly painful way to turn from oneself.  In its own way, it is a form of courage I want us to talk and think about today, for it means deep personal cost to oneself.

Though born in New Orleans and raised in Algiers on the west bank, my mother’s family really instead came from the fais do dos, and the earth; not from the city.

They were part ethnic Acadian, part Choctaw, part Métis.  Their mixed blood Cajun heritage remains a source of great pride in our family.

But our estrangement from Louisiana traces to my mother’s decision to leave the South during the Civil Rights movement, unable to abide the violence and ugliness embedded in its DNA, and without the motivation to stay and work from within.  Of course that was in 1960, when Joseph McNeill, Franklin McCain, and David Richardson courageously protested against department store lunch counter discrimination in Greensboro.  And it would be four years later when James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were lynched in the same Philadelphia, Mississippi that Ronald Reagan intentionally chose twenty years later to launch his campaign for the Presidency.

I wanted to tell you a little about my mother because if I have a sense of justice and memory and myth, it comes from her.  My father, who experienced life in a refugee camp in Europe after World War II, was no stranger to suffering, to be sure.  But it is my mother who gave me the great love I have for peace – though I myself have been known to have a temper, and she also gave me my great affection for Louisiana.  I wanted to introduce my mother to you because the topic of my comments this morning is courage.

And I think there are two kinds of courage I want to speak to on this important day.  Very related, and quite different.

The first is the courage my mother demonstrated:  the courage to give up something of yourself to obtain something essential.  We are all quite familiar with what it means to make a deal with the devil, to strike a Faustian Bargain.  But the truth is that progress – individual and community – requires us, almost daily it seems, to make trades.  This job so my children can go to that school.

For my mother, who could not understand the ugly reality of southern prejudice in 1960, better that she leave behind all she loved.  This meant growing up and apart from her brothers and sisters and being a thousand miles away when her father died.

For her, to stay in the South was to implicitly agree with the South’s ways, and that she could not do.  For her, to stay in the South was to explicitly sign on to change things from within.  And the calling for that she could not hear.  And when she struck out for other places, she mistakenly thought she was leaving behind racism, that it wasn’t going to be wherever she might find herself.  And what a rude discovery this was.

So when a year and a half ago I mentioned I was headed to Covington, I knew she was both smiling at the lovely memories of those cool North Shore family picnics, and at the same time pained to recall the broader truths about Louisiana in 1960.

Her bravery in saying goodbye was costly.  She gained access to new people and new places and new ideas – and frankly most of the places where she has since lived are gentler than Louisiana, and so she benefitted from the bargain she struck.  But it’s not a bargain she negotiated without cost.  And fifty years later, as her brothers and sisters have gone on with their own lives – here in Louisiana, the breach remains a wide and painful one.  Invariably, a plate of etouffé is both a redolent and joyful reminder of who she is, and a stinging rebuke for her decision to leave.  And leave behind a very important part of herself.

I will return to this type of courage later, for I believe that to the extent there are two Covingtons or two Baton Rouges, or two Americas for that matter, a form of courage we have to come face to face with is the courage required to trade culture – by which I mean some part of who we are – for equity – by which I mean participation in society.  And as this form of courage is almost exclusively a requirement imposed by a majority on the minority, it is a most unfair courage to require.

I suspect King would push back against this, the notion that the price of full membership in society is the loss of some essential part of who we are.  Then again, I am also confident King would be among the first to agree that the tension between individual and community is good.

The second courage is the courage to creatively suffer.  This is what King asks of us.  In the face of injustice, King reminded us, we must negotiate.  We must come forward, and seek to understand.  We have a responsibility to learn.  This is the root of empathy.  It is the most central of our obligations to others as members of a community.  To understand.  As the Greek poet Aeschylus wrote, “He who learns must suffer.”

We must listen.  We must hear.  To understand.  And, invariably, to suffer.

We must identify the injustice and call it out.

In doing so, King knew firsthand, we will be branded as troublemakers.  But King required that when we see injustice, we have an obligation to call attention to it.  To obtain moral membership in the moral community we cannot just stand by.

In response to such troublemaking, there would be great distress.  And the resulting tension would be met at the negotiation table with all sorts of attempts to avoid dealing with the underlying injustice.  We know today what those injustices then were, and we know they remain:  poverty, segregation, unkindness, separation, isolation.

Society isn’t more polite today than it was in 1960.  We just have better excuses  now for avoiding hard work than we used to.  In 1960 there was no Civil Rights Act to point to; no Voting Rights Act; no Fair Housing legislation.

With those accomplishments in our rear view mirror, with the Honorable John Lewis in Congress, and Andrew Young having been Mayor of Atlanta, and Ralph Abernathy long departed; with Julian Bond at the faculty of the University of Virginia, and Barack Obama in the White House, we may be excused for thinking the work is done.

That there is no more need to make trouble.  King would disagree.

I imagine many of you do, as well.  For injustice persists.

And I didn’t need to say it out loud for it to be true.

It exists in my home town of Alexandria, VA in the form of homelessness.  It exists in Haiti today in the form of hunger.  In the Sudan in the form of persecution and slavery.  What King required of us then, and what I am convinced he would require of us now, is that we make trouble.  That we inject distress into the system.

It was while in prison in Birmingham, Alabama, pushing back against Bull Connor and white Alabama clergymen, when King wrote that we must be willing to engage in creative suffering in the face of injustice.  That it is in the “shadow of deep disappointment” resulting from not being listened to – when we are not heard – when after playing fair we are still not being treated fairly – that we must not in the face of broken promises, seek solace in the “anesthetizing security” found in “the blanket of anger”, but instead suffer creatively through persistent insistence on a new status quo.

These two sublime courages – the giving up of something of yourself on one hand, and on other, the absorption of the heat of the community vocalizing it’s displeasure with you for having persistently drawn attention to injustice – are why we are here today.

For it is in these two forms of suffering – these two forms of making trouble – that we can begin to re-engage in good faith.  It is here – through courage – where we are called to be the kinds of misfits, rebels, and troublemakers the community needs to obtain moral clarity sufficient to disobey the status quo.

I believe this is what King meant when he ripened the issue of injustice, purposefully fostering “a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront [only because] the issue has been dramatized to the point where it can no longer be ignored.”

Now I am ashamed to confess that I, myself come to intersections, and, looking forward and often see the homeless man and his cardboard sign seeking handouts in the bitterest cold, only to avert my eyes to his suffering, and drive on.  I have shamefully chosen to ignore my brother’s suffering on occasions, and the larger truth is that the injustice remains.  And so this is a shame I must carry.  It is a shame King would say requires me to be more courageous, so that I, myself might “rise from the bondage of myths and half truths” and in turn help others “rise from their own dark depths.”

And five years after King wrote those words, and just four months before he, himself was killed, Robert Kennedy eulogized the slain King in Indianapolis, saying “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country.”

Getting there requires what King called “the more excellent way of love”, what he referred to as the one justification for being a troublemaker, or, as he put it, an extremist, when he said of those who seek to build community, “the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be?”

Now these two courages – the giving up of something of yourself on one hand, and on the other suffering the heat of your community vocalizing it’s displeasure with you for having persistently drawn attention to injustice – are required here in Covington today, just as they are in my home town in Virginia, and as they are throughout the country in 2011.

For Covington is not just one community here on the North Shore, it is two.  And as King wrote from his jail cell, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

What am I referring to specifically in Covington?  How does this tie back, both celebrating the message of extremism for justice through creative suffering, and applying it in a real way to the real lives of real people right here right now in 2011?

In my field, which is community development, and which is connected to Civil Rights inasmuch as both are aimed at the elusive goal of equity, I believe there are three categorical imperatives.

The first is that we meet people where they are. It does no good to meet the five foot one inch high school guard who desperately wants to play basketball for her school and coach her as if she’s got the height and arm length of a forward.  People are where they are for reasons, and where they are in large part determines how they see the world.  As many including Nelson Mandela said:  “where you stand depends on where you sit.”

And it was the Serpent in Shaw’s Back to Methuselah who said, ““You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?’”

This is all well and good on paper, but in real life, in the real world struggle of mortgages and jobs and kids, of unemployment and disability and predatory lending, we must listen.

Meeting people where they are is about listening so we can learn.  This is the beginning of empathy.  It is not enough to see the housing conditions in the West 30s and say “that’s awful, something should be done.”  That may be where we eventually find ourselves.  But first we must seek to understand.

And this is of profound importance because it goes to a central dilemma we face in community development:  the problem of broken promises.

When there is injustice, the troublemaker in each of us brings that to light, forcing the community to finally grapple with problems that have festered.  If we merely make a show of listening, if we only appear to listen, eventually attendance fades, interest wanes, and the sores of persistent pain worsen.  They reveal themselves in terrible ways.

To meet people where they are, we must really listen, and that of course requires we have the ability to hear.

My brother is a doctor and years ago in his residency an old man came to him and in the examining room my brother asked if he could take a patient history.  Sure, the man replied.  So my brother asked if he’d ever had any broken bones.  No.  Ever had surgery?  No.  Been hospitalized?  No.  My brother asked if the man would undress so he could be examined.  And there in front of my brother was, on the old man’s chest, a ten inch scar.  And on his back several rather serious scars there as well.  My brother asked, what’s that, pointing to the man’s chest?  Oh that…that’s where I had heart bypass!  And back here?  Oh those!  That’s from being shot in the war.  And this scar here?  That?  That’s from hip replacement.

By now my brother was onto the larger truth that the man also had dementia, and that his entire battery of questions had to shift in order to be meaningful.  To understand, he had to listen.  To hear, he had to ask the right questions.  To be a partner, he needed the energy and intention to be creative with the information, and empathic with this new knowledge.

In community development we are often very good as a field in figuring out where people are, and meeting them there.  We have become very good at listening to know what’s going on.

The second categorial imperative of community development in my view is that we determine what people need. Likewise the field has become very adept at this.

We have become quite skilled in learning what it is people say or think they can do.  Whether individual capacity to take care of their home or community capacity to manage neighborhood conditions, the field of community development – from social workers to architects – has developed substantial skills in assessing capacity.

King himself became very familiar with this, having been stabbed in 1958 in Harlem.  For hours, with the weapon embedded in his upper chest, he had to patiently wait for the right time for surgery to become more likely to succeed.  King’s capacity for life saving surgery had to be ascertained before any attempt at removal could be made.  His capacity to be saved was offset by his capacity to be patient.

What King needed was time.  He needed to be stabilized.  He may have wished for the weapon – a letter opener right next to his aorta – to be removed.  But he only had the capacity to endure stabilization first.  Only later could he be saved.  Only later would he be ready.

Now we in community development are very good at these two categorical requirements.  That we meet people where they, and that we understand what they need.  And for this, we have much to be proud.

Yet almost 50 years since Reverend King called for extremism in the name of love, and in pursuit of excellence, even as he demanded that our means be “pure”, we have grinding multigenerational poverty in some of our communities.  Right here on the North Shore, just as in my own backyard in Virginia.

Indeed many of our communities are not one community but two, hardly less segregated than in 1963, the year I was born.  And if we have become less racially segregated in some places, we are as economically separate as ever.

So what might the connection be?  The one tying together community development with what King called ‘creative suffering”?

I said I believe there are three imperatives of community development.  Meeting people where they are.  Determining what they need.

But if there is a failure to honor King during my lifetime with work equal to the sacrifices of Parks and Marshall and Evers – and concurrently an opportunity, it is moving further.

We must move past the discovery of where people are, and what they think they are capable of, and into the realm of a new kind of creative suffering.

As King pushed LBJ, the community development field must paradoxically push for more creative suffering by the very people we are called to work with who are, already, suffering so much.

The third categorical imperative of community development in my opinion is the obligation to push those who need into the realm of new self definition from being needy, to being hungry to do more for themselves through the discovery of doing more for others.

Our communities have become complacent.  We have become lazy.

Our low-income neighborhoods are as isolated and forbidding as ever.  The time has come to ask more of those who need, not less.

In recent years the liberal gestalt led by the false voices of – ironically enough – the Congressional Black Caucus – has been to angrily denounce this as “blaming the victim”, when in truth it is rather that the time has come to raise the bar.  To set even higher expectations.  To push the human race forward.

In low-income community after low-income community, boys wear their pants around their knees, and as a consequence of an American society that believes none of us are our brother’s keeper, we look the other way.  We say nothing.  But the ugly truth is that young man is not prepared to succeed in the world when we look the other way.  The world may have unfair requirements of that young man, but they are requirements nonetheless, and unless we as community developers are willing to address that young man’s challenges, he will be ostracized, and isolated, and unable to become the positive contributing member of what King called a “network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny”.

When I was six years old I was playing baseball with my friends at the Eldridge Park Elementary School in a shabby part of Trenton, New Jersey.  I was six, so I didn’t know it was shabby then.  Only as an adult with the taint of adult sensibility do I now know it to be as such.

We were playing ball and I had to pee.  So I went to a tree and before I knew it a giant claw grabbed my neck and a man started to yell at me.  My friends scrammed, leaving me to this enormous, and enormously angry man, who proceeded to figure out where I lived and then forcefully marched me home, all the while yelling loudly, “what are you, son, an animal?  Do you think you don’t have to go home when you need to use the bathroom?”

As afraid as I was, I was far more petrified of what my father would say, and seemingly in an instant there we were, on the front porch of my house with the crazy man knocking on the door.  My dad answered and the man said “is this your son?”  “Yes, what happened?” my dad replied.  “He was about to pee on a tree in the public park next to the school, and I just knew this was not something you would permit, Sir.”

I mention this because here was a man who got involved.  Who at some risk to himself – until then only I knew my dad was crazy ! – reached into the community of neighbors and asked more.  He was pushing people beyond where the norm was and towards a new norm.  He saw a degenerating status quo and began to assert his own standards, asking more of himself and in the process more of his neighbors.  He was taking risks we have somehow forgotten how to take.

He was, in his own crude way, aware of his ties belonging him to me and me to him, and to others in our own network of mutuality.  He was asking, in effect, more of me, more of himself, and together, more of us.  He made a profound contribution to the work of preparing me to succeed in the world, doing his part to make me pull up my pants.

In community development we do not do this.  We do not come right out and talk about the effects of loud music on the quality of life in a neighborhood.  We are afraid of candor.  The trash in one’s yard.  The couches on front porches.  We don’t parent another’s children.  And dare I say one effect of this is what has happened recently in Tucson, Arizona with the tragic shooting of 20 people.  A whole community conspired to be uninvolved in the life of a young man, who in turn decided, it would seem, to let everyone know what the poisonous side of isolation and segregation contains.

In our low income communities today, we in the community development field invariably confront issues of race, and inevitably this means our work involves housing and neighborhoods and segregation and income and wealth.

But the great remaining unspoken part of our work these days is that the normal behaviors of many isolated low income communities are behaviors woven into the fabric not just of poverty economics and injustice, but race and racial culture.  And these norms often function as barriers to achieving any redemption of our sin of segregation.

When our children wear their pants around their legs, the wider community has the very excuse it needs to stay away.  When our homes are not taken care of, the wider community has another excuse to stay away.  These add up to so much avoidance that we have not just two communities of different means, but two communities with little to no genuine exchange.

And when you factor in the tendency of those in power to look away, what grows beneath the surface, out of the light, becomes sanctioned injustice.  Our low-income communities do have needs.

But to my way of thinking, we all have the capacity to do more.  And too often and for too long we have engaged in a conspiracy to not ask very much of one another.  King’s response to this would be now what it was in Birmingham, when he wrote, “injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience.”

My own view is that the behaviors too commonplace in too many low income communities – where injustice dominates – cements the very separation and resulting justified isolation that in turn begets segregation and diminished wealth.

This third imperative – to ask more of those already suffering – is by no means easy.  But it is the necessary response to the wider community’s own moral shortcomings.  This is our version of creative suffering.  To ask more of one another, to push beyond what is comfortable.  To embrace being one another’s keeper.  To seek to be part of one another’s garments.  To take risks.

As Aristotle wrote, “that which we must learn to do, we learn by doing.”

I’ll close with reference to the lyrics from two generations, my mothers, and mine, and ask you to close your eyes, and listen and think about the kind of community you are willing to creatively suffer to make real.

Like my mother, Phil Ochs was born in 1940.  Like all of us here today, she like him was dedicated to a more perfect Union.  A gifted songwriter, Ochs was closely connected to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Americans for Democratic Action, and was outspoken in his criticisms of American foreign policy in the late 1960s.  In response to a growing sense of apathy he felt was defining America, he wrote a song titled “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends,” which include the following words:

Riding down the highway, yes, my back is getting stiff

Thirteen cars are piled up, they’re hanging on a cliff.

Maybe we should pull them back with our towing chain

But we gotta move and we might get sued and it looks like it’s gonna rain

While this captures the challenge darkly if poignantly, it was rather two women – Emily Saliers and Amy Ray, born a few months before and after me 47 years ago, who, as The Indigo Girls – artists from my generation, captured the opportunity, when in their song “Hammer and Nail” they sang:

A distant nation my community

A street person my responsibility

If I have a care in the world

I have a gift to bring

Finally, never forget that changing a community’s normal way of doing things takes courage, requires that we invest the time to listen, and that we assume the risk of being frank and candid.

And it is  this combination of courage through listening, and risk taking, that we can honor the civil rights movement.”

The Pros and Cons of Economic Diversity Charles Buki | Philadelphia PA | November 2010

Published originally at Planetizen:  http://www.planetizen.com/node/47053

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In 20 years of working in community development, one sees all kinds of markets in all kinds of conditions.

Strong housing conditions at the top of the market in San Francisco where the ratio of housing cost to income was 12:1. Weak markets like Buffalo where it’s almost 1:1. Middle market suburbs of varying stripes, and utter decay like Camden, East St. Louis, and Flint.

Along the way, certain truths emerge. Truths about how neighborhoods work. What it means for housing values. For families. For policy.

For the better part of my career, having seen early on what the absence of economic diversity can mean, I have been calling for what might be labeled a centrist agenda when it comes to urban policy and neighborhood planning. It’s my view that we have never had such an approach.

We often say we do, but in truth, we have not ever really come close to such a thing. Neither the left – which is focused almost entirely on addressing the needs of the poor – nor the right – which is focused mainly on cost shifting and ensuring private gain at public expense – has genuinely aimed for a centrist approach to neighborhoods.

What might define a centrist approach? Mainly one that is characterized by balance. And in my experience, balance is most easily understood in the context of imbalance. And imbalance is most present when the neighborhood is all White, or all Black, or all Brown; when the housing is all old, or all cheap, or all multifamily, or all in disrepair, or all anything at one end of the spectrum, and all new, or all costly, or all single family, or all perfect at the other.  When neighborhoods are at either of these extremes, there’s a price to pay.

Now lets not kid ourselves.  I am suggesting sustainability is based on diversity, and the foundation for that is that we mix. And that carries a high cost if on one hand you are mainly concerned about all the wealth staying here and all the poor over there, or if on the other, you are mainly concerned about equitable outcomes and process that feels good.

What I am talking about – economic diversity – is the stuff of sustainability. It’s the stuff neither the right nor left are particularly interested in. Not really. So what I am talking about is the hard stuff, and I will try to fly over it in five quick parts.

1. First, a quick overview of how neighborhoods decline and the relationship w resulting increases in affordability. This is important because the inverse relationship between affordability and livability is something that advocates utterly deny in their policies and approaches to city life – politics being what it is – which is to say that it is politically unacceptable to say that the de facto affordable housing policy in almost every city in America is a keep the neighborhood distressed policy.

2. Second, I’m going to discuss concentrated poverty and its role and impacts. It’s been an astonishing 45 years since the Moynihan Report, and 25 years since William Julius Wilson’s landmark and breathtaking The Truly Disadvantaged, each in their own way summing up the narrative arc of disinvestment, decline, and resulting concentrations of poverty, yet here we are in 2010 thinking the removal of Richard Allen Homes means for some our work is done and for others that we blew it.

3. Third, any candid discussion of economic diversity must not only reference race, but locate the issue of race as a central if not in some markets the key factor shaping settlement. It’s not an easy conversation to have, but not having it doesn’t make it any better. So I want to touch on some important elements of economic diversity and their relationship to race.

4. Fourth, I want to frame at least a bit the policy and program landscape we have. From hollow and self serving planning initiatives that permeate far too much of the conversation, to the well-meaning but ultimately disingenuous housing finance agency and community development positions taken throughout the country in the context of production and equity, what we have is perfectly sustainable; that is if one doesn’t care about neighborhoods. I would argue we have settled and can do better, but that the main players on stage today don’t want real change. Though they talk a good game.

5. Finally, how to do better. How do we improve neighborhoods and keep our eye on economic diversity?

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So let’s start first with how neighborhoods change.

The place to begin any serious discussion about neighborhoods and diversity is to introduce the issue of demand. By demand I mean choice. Choice to be here or there, but NOT IN BOTH. Choice to buy this house or that house. To live in that apartment or another one.

When choosing, we demand.  More of this.  Less of that.

Neighborhoods are places that are in demand to one extent or another. The key point to keep in mind is that demand is all about appeal. How appealing is my home that I wish to sell? How appealing am I as a neighbor to those considering coming into my neighborhood. What happens to that neighborhood when I choose this one instead?

Appeal. What is that exactly?

It’s just what you think it is. How attractive are you? Am I? What you have to know is a neighborhood is a collection of people, each with a certain amount of appeal as neighbors. As a collection of houses, each with more or less appeal. The less appeal, the lower the demand. The lower the demand the lower the price. The lower the price, the greater the affordability. When affordability rises, it affects who moves in and who moves in shapes who moves out. A dirty little not so secret secret is that poorer families don’t make great neighbors much the time except to one another.

The market avoids undesirable neighbors, sometimes with good reason. Often for no reason other than ungrounded prejudice. But the effect is the same. If you push people away, demand falls, prices fall, disinvestment ensues, more people are pushed away, and then you’re in a tailspin that is not corrected by more affordable housing, or better housing unless improved conditions are a result of changed behaviors. Affordability may be improved. But not marketability without a fundamental shift in behaviors. Period.  And because this cannot be disentangled from race and class dispositions, we do not talk about it.  How they behave.  And because society uses supposition for evidence, how they look becomes the dominant proxy for how they behave.

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East Baltimore

Next is the issue of concentrated poverty. This is what we must all work against.

There are many ways to get there, none easy. Few pursued.  Most a source of fear through misuse and misunderstanding, as it’s often it’s the case that cities and agencies confuse pathways to get there.

You can deconcentrate poverty by bringing in families who are not poor. When working and moderate and middle income families move in, they can displace or they can come by addition. The two are not one and the same. We must acknowledge this.

Poverty can also be deconcentrated by lifting families out of poverty. But if we are serious in our discussion we must also acknowledge that this is a multi-generational project, not a few weeks or months or years. If we are addressing a neighborhood, we have to face the fact that markets will not wait for educational and income inequity to get addressed.

Could there be a both/and approach? Without question. But the point is that neighborhoods are not improved by remaining home to concentrations of poor families and that condition is not something that is fixed over night. Moreover, the work of addressing low incomes and low education and low earning power is not the same as addressing weak neighborhoods. At a fundamental level we must understand the skills and data and tactical toolkits for one are only barely related to the other.

In any event, why pay attention to this? Why not just leave the status quo in place? Why not just have sections of cities be okay for lots of poor families? I mean this is the de facto policy of many cities, anyway, is it not? Of our Trentons and Newarks and Pittsburghs and Baltimores and LAs, and of certain unnamed foundations and federal agencies, the tax credit mafia, the syndicators, the intermediaries. No? Really?

Here’s why. Concentrated poverty means unequal educational opportunity, the surest way to keep poor people’s children poor. It means low aggregate purchasing power so services are lousy. Low incomes are also a good proxy for low standards, so it means continued signals to the outside market that this is a place where people don’t care. Outsiders think “if they don’t care, why should I?” If how they look were ever subordinated in a more enlightened society, their behavior quickly fill any lingering vacuum as the wider market  avoids the neighborhood. Demand falls. Disinvestment ensues.

How do we respond in America? We add “neighborhood watch” signs to tell outsiders it’s unsafe.  We add more low-income housing? Seriously?

Why else? Low income families have low wealth and low credit scores. This means concentrated poverty is concentrated rental. It means high levels of absentee owners. It means we have hundreds if not thousands of toxic marriages we incubate between reprobate slumlords who should be in jail on one hand, and families who haven’t a clue about being a good neighbor on the other. It means not just high levels of rental tenure, but more often, subsidized rental, which means the market never actually works. It’s a fake market. The housing we add is priced not to market conditions, but to assure conditions never improve. Is there anything more cynical?

What we’ve created is a perfect system if you have given up on the aspiration that low income families ought to be able to live in a stable and healthy neighborhood.

Whether you call it public housing that’s too big and too dense and too massive, or below market-rate privately held housing, when there’s no diversity, there’s no hope in concentrated poverty. The market knows this, and ratifies this through avoidance.

Vermont Slausen

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As I said earlier, race plays a huge role in all this. The market, after all, is a collection of people.With their objective points of view and their prejudices and bigotry altogether. Open minded or not about race, people look for cues about the future of a neighborhood. They make choices about probable safety and probable quality of life and probable return on investment.

Probable. A loaded word.

But it’s the operative word we must return to when we talk about race and neighborhoods. In America, race has become a proxy for class. Less so than 25 years ago for sure, but in urban America, Black still equals poor and poor still equals Black and Black and poor in the minds of the market means unsafe. A place to be avoided. And this judgment is rendered not by White America alone, but by Black middle class America, Caribbean America, East and West African immigrants, Hispanic America, you name it. This puts Blacks, especially low income Blacks, but also any minority, in an awful situation of unbearable painfulness in my view.

It’s a situation Jews faced throughout Europe in the last part of the 19th and early 20th century. Assimilate (become more like them and less like us), or suffer isolation, and through isolation, endure deprivation, inequality, and more isolation.

Become less Jewish and they will like us more. If they like us more, they will accept us more.

If they accept us more, we can mix. If we can mix, we can benefit.

Become less Black, less Vietnamese, less Hispanic, less whomever you happen to be, and the benefits follow. This of course comes at the highest price of all for some – identity. Others argue identity is a small price to pay for one’s child to get a good education or for my children to walk to school safely. A Hobson’s Choice. This is of course true for any minority in any majority situation in an open market.

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So this is a tough landscape. No doubt about it. Begging the question, what does the policy setting look like in 2010?

Dubuque

We have a progressive administration in power. Genuine talent at HUD and Treasury (finally). In Philadelphia there are thoughtful organizations like TRF, and in states like Alaska and Colorado and Pennsylvania some very smart housing finance agencies. In cities like Philadelphia there have been a succession of very talented mayors. Very data-driven programs and efforts. In my view though there is no constituency for real change in urban policy and programs.

In the design and planning professions there’s the Transect and Smart Codes and New Urbanism. But that’s pretty ephemeral stuff. In the affordable housing field there’s NSP 2 and 3 and there will surely be NSP 47 given enough time and cynicism. But it’s all pretty much the same jibberish.

When we see tax incentives for inclusionary development, then we’ll know we are on the right track.

But that’s not what we have.

We have a left that deep down inside has effectively asked itself “without a them to advocate for, what would we do?” and a right that simply says “we don’t want them near us.”

These two extremes share a secret handshake we might call Habitat for Humanity. The left runs Habitat programs to ensure the very poor are housed. The right donates to, and volunteers at Habitat programs to ensure they are housed over there. Everybody feels good. People are housed. Over there. People gave. To a program housing people over there. But over there never gets any better.

Now this is a bit unfair to make a whipping boy out of Habitat for Humanity, and under new leadership Habitat has been migrating to a more thoughtful milieu rather than the housing redoubt it had set out to establish; I am really just making a point. You can substitute as you will. It’s what underlies this that deserves note.

Those on the left label all things housing. Demand problems are treated as supply problems. Choices and consequences are faced with subsidies that respond to needs. Planners are hired to get all the poor people together in a room to tell them what they want, which is then put onto flip charts during community meetings that lead nowhere. But at least now we can map this and refer to elegant GIS-based charts showing what’s what. I know this sounds cynical but I really think what I said earlier is what we must acknowledge: there’s a very thin constituency for economically diverse neighborhoods in any real sense. Certainly not on the side of the spectrum occupied by most housing advocates and most planners. Of course such cynicism relies on that secret handshake I mentioned. And that means there has to be a wink and a nod from the right to make it work. And indeed there is. And this is best summed up by simply labeling the right for what it is when it comes to urban and suburban policy: those whose view is “just make sure they are over there”.

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Now, before everyone concludes the message is that there’s nothing we can do, that the die is cast, that we have crossed the Rubicon, and that the only thing left is to recite the serenity prayer, let me say we do know how to intervene and remake older urban neighborhoods into thriving places with some sense of economic diversity. It’s not easy. It’s not pretty. But we do know a few things. And the core of what we know is not a design problem.  Not a land use problem.  Not a code problem.  Not a supply shortage.  It’s a behavioral problem that requires giving a little to get a little.

So how do we get a little and what do we give?

First, our aim has to be on choice and demand, and that means we have to make our community desirable. The big housing and community development nonprofits of the world thought the way to do this was to build more housing. I am not making this up. The chief lobbyist for one of them told me that at lunch one day in Washington some years ago. I couldn’t decide whether to punch him or throw up, so stupid was that viewpoint, and so certain was that approach likely to keep poor people poor and lousy neighborhoods lousy, all the while waltzing through hundreds of millions of dollars a year in tax credit financing.

Fortunately we learn. That’s what humans do. And the learning here is that the old approach, while not exactly right, was not entirely wrong, either.

The aim is and must be to make a place more appealing.

Making Saginaw More Appealing

Sometimes you can do this by building. But more often it is to make a place more desirable for others to come and for them to build. Goad the market into deciding it is worth them building, worth their investment. Do this so demand rises. So prices rise. So the benefits of stability accrue. So stores and services improve through diversity and increased purchasing power. So role models actually exist through increased diversity.

How?

Retain first, and attract second. You have to repurpose a neighborhood one block at a time, one family at a time, starting with who is there now. This is our constituency. You grow existing strengths.  You do not spend scarce resources fixing problems.  You do use subsidy but not to directly incent outside investment; rather to indirectly obtain it by directly incenting existing strong households to make their homes and blocks even stronger.

How?

Painfully. You insist on a change of behaviors so the community’s norms stop scaring outsiders away and scaring strong families back into their shells.

How?

By changing the norms of property upkeep and residency and rewarding good neighborliness. These are not sexy undertakings. But they are the bread and butter of stability. When neighborhoods are full of families who do the small things in appealing ways, stability ensues. When there’s a glimmer of stability, the market notices.

Our neighborhoods exist in a competitive context. We all have to compete for our share of good neighbors. This is the constituency for economic diversity. This is the path to balance. Most of the private sector doesn’t care about struggling families except to avoid them when choosing where to live. Not because they are poor but because they equate poverty with unappealing behaviors. Most of the community development sector doesn’t care about economic diversity because to achieve it, their constituency will have to make some concessions and change some behaviors. Neither side is giving an inch and the result should surprise no one.

We can do better.